Suppose any one should be sleeping there!

I listened at the window attentively before I ventured on taking my lantern out of my coatpocket.  The night was so quite and airless that there was not the faintest rustle among the leaves in the garden beneath me to distract my attention.  I listened.  The breathing of the lightest of sleepers must have reached my ear, through that intense stillness, if the room had been a bedroom, and the bed were occupied.  I heard nothing but the quick beat of my own heart.  The minutes of suspense were passing heavily—­I laid my other hand over the window-sill, then a moment of doubt came—­doubt whether I should carry the adventure any further.  I mastered my hesitation directly—­it was too late for second thoughts.  “Now for it!” I whispered to myself, and got in at the window.

To wait, listening again, in the darkness of that unknown region, was more than I had courage for.  The moment I was down on the floor, I pulled the lantern out of my pocket and raised the shade.

So far, so good—­I found myself in a dirty lumber-room.  Large pans, some of them cracked and more of them broken; empty boxes bound with iron, of the same sort as those I had seen the workmen bringing in at the front gate; old coal sacks; a packing-case full of coke; and a huge, cracked, mouldy blacksmith’s bellows—­these were the principal objects that I observed in the lumber-room.  The one door leading out of it was open, as I had expected it would be, in order to let the air through the back window into the house.  I took off my shoes, and stole into the passage.  My first impulse, the moment I looked along it, was to shut down my lantern-shade, and listen again.

Still I heard nothing; but at the far end of the passage I saw a bright light pouring through the half-opened door of one of the mysterious front rooms.

I crept softly toward it.  A decidedly chemical smell began to steal into my nostrils—­and, listening again, I thought I heard above me, and in some distant room, a noise like the low growl of a large furnace, muffled in some peculiar manner.  Should I retrace my steps in that direction?  No—­not till I had seen something of the room with the bright light, outside of which I was now standing.  I bent forward softly; looking by little and little further and further through the opening of the door, until my head and shoulders were fairly inside the room, and my eyes had convinced me that no living soul, sleeping or waking, was in any part of it at that particular moment.  Impelled by a fatal curiosity, I entered immediately, and began to look about me with eager eyes.